Intel Releases OSPRay 2.0 Ray Tracing Engine

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By Arne Verheyde
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Intel bulks up the open-source ray tracing engine

Disney’s Moana Island Scene: over 15 billion instanced primitives rendered interactively (Image credit: Intel)

Intel has released version 2.0 of the open source OSPRay ray-tracing engine and comes with various improvements, Phoronix found out.

Intel describes OSPRay as an open, scalable, and portable (OSP) ray tracing engine for CPU rendering, geared towards scientific visualization applications. It supports ambient occlusion, shadows, global illumination with physically-based materials and volume rendering, and it can be run on large, distributed-memory systems. OSPRay also supports the latest AVX-512 instruction set and is part of Intel’s oneAPI programming model.

The patch notes detail that version 2.0 brings API-breaking improvements, but comes with an API migration library. It further uses the Intel Open Volume Kernel Library (Open VKL) for “greatly enhanced volume sampling and rendering features and performance.” Version 2.0 also supports Intel’s Open Image Denoise and uses the latest Intel version of Embree, Intel's collection of high-performance ray tracing kernels.

All details are on OSPRay’s GitHub page.

Arne Verheyde
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6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JayNor
    Intel described oneAPI rendering support for OSPRay. With their Xe graphics development boards out, we should eventually see an OSPRay version that is accelerated by GPUs, right?

    https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-oneapi-rendering-toolkit-ospray-system-requirements
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    JayNor said:
    Intel described oneAPI rendering support for OSPRay. With their Xe graphics development boards out, we should eventually see an OSPRay version that is accelerated by GPUs, right?

    https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-oneapi-rendering-toolkit-ospray-system-requirements


    This guy gets it. :D
    Reply
  • mamasan2000
    API is "Open" but hardware support only comes from one source. Intel. Not that open.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    mamasan2000 said:
    API is "Open" but hardware support only comes from one source. Intel. Not that open.
    Out of the box, yes. However, someone is doing a port for oneAPI apps to run atop CUDA, on Nvidia GPUs.

    Intel did use a number of fairly substantial open building blocks, such as SYCL, in their oneAPI architecture. Compare that to Nvidia, who has a 100% proprietary stack (yes, they also support old versions of OpenCL, but that's on the side and none of their application libraries use it).
    Reply
  • Rdslw
    mamasan2000 said:
    API is "Open" but hardware support only comes from one source. Intel. Not that open.
    well its OPEN as they don't lock anyone from using it.
    they probably can license it to nvidia for as little as 51% of their shares & few virgin souls.
    Reply
  • joeblowsmynose
    JayNor said:
    Intel described oneAPI rendering support for OSPRay. With their Xe graphics development boards out, we should eventually see an OSPRay version that is accelerated by GPUs, right?

    https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-oneapi-rendering-toolkit-ospray-system-requirements


    Yes, could be related.

    Intel released the Embree raytracing kernels back in the day that I think came out of the Knights Landing project, and that has turned into things like V-Ray (GPU 3D renderer), and Corona renderer (CPU).

    AMD has been working Radeon Pro Render (GPU+CPU openCL renderer) for several years now ... I have long suspected that they are using the research here to help them develop GPU hardware raytracing systems. It seems likely Intel would possibly do the same - if you are working on one, you might as well consider the other for the best software / hardware homogeneity.
    Reply